Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars AU Review

Forget the drugs - Rockstar's latest is just as addictive.

Every Grand Theft Auto has two common elements that make up the whole: formula and agenda. By their genre-defining nature, each title has, since the PlayStation era, adhered to a structure that holds fewer and fewer surprises - and this has allowed Rockstar to refine these games and their fundamental mechanics into something wonderful and even extraordinary. The 'agenda', on the other hand, can be viewed as the heart of the tale, surmising your motivations and giving each instalment a unique flavour or angle – usually in the form of the main character, his background and motivation.

To this end, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars' aspirations are a little more transparent than prior titles, sporting its roots on its sleeve – or more literally, on its cover. It's an engrossing adventure that achieves a lot – mostly within the formula the series has become synonymous with, while this time focussing on Liberty City's Chinese Triads for flavour. This time, however, the Nintendo DS has allowed Rockstar Leeds' large scale production team to experiment a little bit with touch screen mechanics and a user interface that needs to be adopted by the mainline series in the future.

Huang Lee, the lead character in Chinatown Wars, barely steps off the plane in Liberty City before becoming entangled in something much larger than he anticipated. A sacred family sword, the 'Yu Jian', is taken from his possession and his late father's name is slandered by conniving relatives and ladder-climbing sociopaths. Now Lee is out to recover the blade and seek vengeance for the murder of his old man and make his way out the other end in one piece, while spilling some blood and chainsawing some fools along the way – you know, for good measure. Huang isn't alone in Liberty City; your uncle Wu 'Kenny' Lee is your first point of contact, and his early missions both teach you the gameplay ropes as well as open a few doors while rubbing your nose in the underworld dirt.

Your first drive through Liberty City, which mirrors the layout of GTAIV's landscape, minus Alderney, is a somewhat jarring experience. The perspective has reverted back to the classic quasi-overhead view of the famed PSOne titles, the camera now mostly fixed behind your car, though it automatically rotates if you do a U-turn – and you can quickly pull the camera back in line by tapping the Left shoulder button. The D-pad controls your character's movement, as well as car steering, eschewing any touch-screen analogue silliness. Aiming lock-on is assigned to the Right shoulder button, while the face buttons variously allow you to sprint, leap or roll, and if unarmed, perform some basic kung fu – because hey, no Asian ethnic video game commentary is complete without a flying kick move, right? Right. As it stands, it's great to see Leeds ensure that your character can still leap over smaller walls and objects, while keeping the lock-on mostly intelligent and intuitive enough to select your nearest threat, rather than cars or pedestrians in the vicinity.

Those missing the over-the-top action of older GTA games will find Chinatown Wars returns to its roots. We like.

Once you kick into a mission, any doubts about how the series might translate to the DS will go out the window; this is vanilla Grand Theft Auto all the way – perhaps even more entertaining in some respects than GTAIV. In addition to your basic smash and grabs, kill-sprees and to-ing and fro-ing, the DS' touch screen pulls you a little deeper into the experience –almost all of the touch-screen activities are really well thought out and integrated into the gameplay as not to distract or, worse, irritate.

Throughout the course of the adventure, you'll hotwire cars, make Molotov cocktails, disarm explosives, defibrillate a body, assemble weapons, break windshields, wrap and pull an engine starter cable, scratch lottery tickets, rifle through trashcans – and a few other clever uses that we'll save for you to discover. Largely, these don't actually add a whole lot to the experience – they're superficial micro-games that kind of flesh out the gameplay and break up the routine. However, the interface, menu system and the mock-PDA operating system are where the touch-screen shines.